Chapter Ten: Going Live
Wren's gear filled half my living room within a week.
Drone cases stacked against the wall, a portable rig with more cables than I could name, two monitors propped on cinder blocks because we didn't own a desk yet. She worked through all of it with the kind of focus that made me feel like I was watching someone finally get to do the job they'd trained for, instead of the one they'd been cut from.
"Okay." She sat cross legged on my floor, laptop balanced on her knees, three days into setup. "I want to be straight with you before we go live. This is going to be ugly at first."
"Define ugly."
"People already think you're a monster. That footage from extraction has like two hundred thousand views now, and most of the top comments are some version of someone needs to stop that thing." She glanced up, checking my face for a reaction. "If we go live and put your name on it, some of that follows you. Maybe most of it."
I thought about the guild ledger, about V, about an entire industry scrambling to find a girl with no last name attached to an S rank record. Two versions of me already existed in the world, and neither of them was accurate. One was a monster. One was a prize. Neither one was actually mine.
"Then let's give them a third option," I said. "Me."
Wren's mouth twitched into something that wasn't quite a smile yet, but was getting there.
"That's either really brave or really stupid."
"Can't it be both?"
We picked a low tier public dungeon for the first stream, nothing sponsored, nothing that would put us on anyone's radar we didn't choose ourselves. Wren ran three drones through the entrance ahead of me, feeding angles back to a stream that opened with exactly forty two viewers, most of them probably there by accident.
"Alright." Her voice came through a small earpiece, steady despite everything. "We're live. Whenever you're ready."
I popped a fresh blowpop into my mouth and stepped through the gate.
The dungeon was nothing dramatic, a mid tier goblin nest, the kind of thing established climbers cleared for warmup before real work. I went through it the way I went through everything now, laughing more than fighting felt like it should require, weapons pulling themselves out of nowhere the second my hand reached for them. A knife here. The bat when things got close. Confetti and shrapnel when a whole room needed clearing at once instead of one target at a time.
Forty two viewers became two hundred by the halfway point. Wren's voice in my ear kept climbing with excitement she wasn't bothering to hide anymore.
"Chat's going insane. Someone just asked if this is real footage or if we're running some kind of filter."
"Tell them it's real."
"I did. Nobody believes me."
By the time I cleared the final chamber, chat had crossed four thousand. I stood in the wreckage of the last room, breathing hard, hammer resting against my shoulder, and looked directly into the drone hovering closest to my face.
"Hi," I said, because nobody had told me what you were supposed to say at the end of something like this. "I'm V. Some of you already know that part. I'm also the girl from the extraction footage a lot of you have been calling a monster." I let that sit for a second, unhurried. "I'm not going to argue with you about it. I'm just going to keep doing this, and you can decide for yourselves what you think you're watching."
I clicked the blowpop against my teeth and walked out of frame.
The reaction split almost exactly in half, which was somehow both better and worse than I expected.
Half of chat, and then half of every comment section that picked the clip up over the following days, decided I was something to root for. Raw, unpolished, funny in a way nothing in the guild world usually bothered being, genuinely terrifying in a fight and genuinely at ease with herself outside of one. She's not a monster, she's just built different, one comment read, sitting near the top of a thread with three thousand upvotes attached to it.
The other half never fully let go of the first impression. Cute gimmick until she snaps and takes someone's head off for real, read another comment, sitting almost directly beside the first one, upvoted nearly as high. You people really watched someone laugh through a massacre and decided she's a girlboss.
Wren showed me both threads side by side that night, laptop balanced between us on the kitchen counter, noodles going cold in front of both of us the way noodles apparently always did in my life at pivotal moments.
"Does it bother you?" she asked. "The second one."
I thought about it honestly, instead of giving the easy answer.
"A little," I admitted. "But not enough to stop." I stole a noodle off her plate since mine had gone cold faster. "I spent two years being invisible because nobody could figure out what box to put me in. Now half the internet can't figure it out either. At least this time I'm the one holding the box."
Wren laughed, quiet and real, the first fully unguarded sound I'd heard out of her since the drone first found me outside that dungeon entrance.
"That's either a really good line," she said, "or you've been rehearsing it since the stream ended."
"Little of both," I admitted, and for the first time since Assignment Day, being unclassifiable felt less like a wound and more like the only honest thing I had left to offer anybody watching.
The stream ended that night at just under six thousand viewers. By morning, the clip of me stepping out of frame with a blowpop in my mouth had already crossed a hundred thousand views on its own, captioned by six different accounts with six different opinions about exactly what kind of story they thought they were watching.
None of them had it quite right.
I was starting to think that might just be the point.